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Friday, February 21, 2014

#927: James McCanney

James McCanney is a certified, licensed massage therapist
who calls himself “Professor McCanney” and is a crackpot’s crackpot, widely
known for his involvement in the Planet X bullshit and various apocalyptic nonsense, on which he has (self-)published
numerous books. The title of his 2003 work, Atlantis
to Tesla – The Kolbrin Connection gives you an idea. Yes, it is – rather
obviously – about Atlantis,
and Tesla,
as well as the Kolbrin.
McCanney has of course been making wildly lunatic claims about things he doesn’t
understand and know nothing about for a long time, but as with most loons of
his kind, it was the Internet that finally provided him with an audience, and
he has more recently appeared extensively on various conspiracy theory radio
shows such as Coast to Coast AM,
where he claims that all scientists, including NASA, is in a conspiracy to lie
to you but that he knows the truth.

His theories are, of course, completely insane, and have
been extensively debunked here;
and yes, McCanney is deeply wrong about absolutely everything, but being
debunked by a scientist isn’t going to change his mind since scientists are all
in a conspiracy to deny his electric comets and the influence of Planet X
(which is really a comet, according to McCanney, but he provides so little
actual information that most followers of Zechariah Sitchinwon’t even notice)
on the frequency of hurricanes on Earth). According to McCanney, comets behave
like giant electrical “vacuum cleaners” in space, attracting material to
themselves and eventually growing into planets – which is of course so wrong in
even its basic premises that it requires some unpacking. The proof that there
is a conspiracy among scientists and NASA is of course that mainstream science
won’t accept his demonstrably wrong ideas (they are ideas “NASA doesn’t want
you to know about,” for some rather unclear reason). For Planet X is, indeed,
coming for us (in the form of a growing comet), and you better buy his book (Planet X, Comets and Earth Changes) to
figure out what to do – oh yes, that’s the follow-up part: His site has a lot
of offers in terms of survivalist junk, and in 2003 he even managed to solicit
donations for a holiday in South America from his readers. Oh, of course, “this
comet will be important and comes at a time when the new world order is trying to keep the lid on celestial issues”. Exactly. And if this Planet X
doesn’t work out, keep in mind that all comets grow, so “there's many, many
planet X objects. We don't have a good handle on the history of these objects,
some of them, not all of them, are gonna cause disasters to Earth.” There is a
good resource on McCanney and his claims here.

He also claims that the moon landings were fake;
but then, when you are so deeply entrenched in conspiracies and pseudoscience
as McCanney you aren’t left with much choice on these questions.

He is of course a legend over at whale.to, the educateyourself
website, and the David Icke forums.

Diagnosis: Hypercrank, of the rather common variety who
takes the fact that everyone thinks your claims are false to be evidence for a
conspiracy, and the existence of a conspiracy to criticize you is further
evidence that you are on the right track. And so on.